Canada's DMCA: CBC radio's Search Engine on the demonstrations and awesome Parliamentary bun-fight that followed

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio programme Search Engine did a great segment this week on the Canadian DMCA kerfuffle, focused on the grassroots campaign that packed the house at Industry Minister Jim Prentice's Christmas Party last week and the Parliamentary fight that followed. This is inspiring stuff, hearing from all these friendly geeks who're trying out activism for the first time because this issue really moves them. You gotta hear the Parliamentary fight -- the New Democratic Party's copyright critic is on fire, and Prentice comes across as a bumbler.
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Oh yeah, it’s a great, little show! Loved listening to that clip of the NDP fellow, with his GREAT questions towards the Minister. Very well done.

I am proud of Canada, and Canadians for standing up, as much as we have! Let’s keep fighting this STUPID legislation and yes, get FAIR copyright! Not roll over and play dead, like the Australians did when the Howard government up and passed a really stupid, restrictive copyright law a couple of years ago.

It sounds to me like it’s a pretty typical case of people who are not part of the government trying to be heard and getting shut down by government reps because they are not playing the game according to the rules the government reps use in order to get things done.

I see it all the time, people want to be heard, and the government wants to hear them, but the government needs things to be done according to the existing conventions and rules of order. That’s why we have professional lobbyists, they have taken the necessary time to find out how to go about being heard.

The legal system is the same way, there are certain ways things are done and if you expect to get anywhere at all you have to either commit to learning the system or hire someone who has.

It’s inconvenient as heck, but if it were otherwise government would be like an internet discussion board, and that would be both inconvenient and pointless.

I know Cory is a fellow Canuck, and therefore has a vested interest in what happens with this proposed Canadian copyright bill, but I think the story in this episode of Search Engine that’s really worth noting is the one about the missing White House emails. I’ve been following the Canadian copyfight story here since the start of this most recent round–and I can’t thank boingboing, and Cory in particular, enough for pointing me in the right direction to do something positive about Canadian copyright legislation–but I am mystified that I rarely can read this much about similar calls to action in the States.

Is the American democratic system so broken and its citizens so cynical that it’s going to take another “series of tubes” foot-in-mouth moment before boingboing rallies its largest audience take political action again? Aside from the missing White House emails (which isn’t the kind of story boingboing usually covers, I admit) there is that FISA amendment bill on the Senate floor that provides for blanket telecom amnesty that boingboing readers might be interested in doing something about….

…and another thing, to all the people who’ve been commenting all week on how *cute* Canadian politics is, it’s not half as cute as a country of 300 million plus people who think that rigged corporate elections every four years somehow make it the greatest democracy in the world. Maybe if everyone in the country wasn’t so preoccupied doing their best Statler and Waldorf impression they might wake up to the possibility that they have an oportunity to affect some kind of change for the better.